


A Weird Sense of Engagement

by MountainMew



Category: Aldnoah.Zero (Anime)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-10
Updated: 2016-01-10
Packaged: 2018-05-12 23:21:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5685445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MountainMew/pseuds/MountainMew
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a girl lights a candle at the edge of a cliff<br/>waiting...<br/>waiting...<br/>waiting for her husband to find his way home</p>
<p>the candle drips and drips<br/>a useless pile of wax<br/>and once it burns out<br/>she'll be a hundred years too old,<br/>and he'll never have the light to guide him home</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Weird Sense of Engagement

**Author's Note:**

> i cant really decipher why i salvage all my long thought pieces for a.z. I never even finished a.z, what right do i have to be introspective about it? I can't really say, but still... I hope people enjoy.  
> I don't really know, if I still enjoy writing or not. But I pour my heart into everything I do, regardless. I don't know, if I enjoy this fic at all or not, but if it makes other people happy to read, I guess that's cool with me. So thanks, as always, for taking the time to read my stuff. It's a heavy subject for me, so I gotta thank y'all constantly for it.  
> Let's go for a walk.

  What does life look like, gazing through a telescope? Do you ever look to the stars, reaching and reaching until your arm hurts so much it might fall off entirely? Do you ever press your fingertips to another’s lips, so wholeheartedly insecure and unsure of what to do next?  
  “Where are we going, today?”  
  My legs have become seemingly useless. A year ago, if you asked how possible it would be to travel the world by foot, I probably would have said ‘ _Not at all._ ’ Now, I’m even less sure, but I think I’d edit my answer enough to say ‘Not at all, because your feet will hurt like hell.’ It’s stupid to laugh about it now, but it’s funny. I don’t want to move any longer, but I can’t stop thinking of where I’d love to be, far more than space.  
  “Don’t know.”  
  Still, doesn’t it hurt, to look to such great landmarks thinking _“How boring,”_ or _“Is this really that special?”_ Don’t your ancestors seem ignorant, to think piles of rocks and grass are worth anything at all? Maybe I’m the fool.  
  I’ve heard so many words sing through my ears without meaning. I’ve walked on so many different kinds of dirt, yet I feel no different than I did a week ago. Or the week before that. Or the week before that.  
  “What’s the point of all this?” I find myself saying more often now.  
  Inaho gives a very genuine blank faced look, this one, I’ve discerned, being one of deep thought. As if he’s really thought about my question everytime I ask, only to give the same answer over and over.  
  “Don’t know.”  
  I don’t remember, either. When we started walking, or why. But nothing’s been boring since that day, nothing at all. Sometimes, the sun is unbearably hot, that I feel like I’m about to suffocate, and sometimes it’s so frigid I fear my heart will give out on the spot. And always, always, always my grip on your hand is so strong, I know I can fall off without much fear.  
  “The flowers here are very pretty.”  
  Beneath my fingertips, the earth crumbles. What may once have been a valiant castle, a human masterpiece, is now moreless a pile of rubble. But still, in spite of everything telling the world to stop turning, roses still bloom in the garden. They've flourished across the building, to the point of making a graveyard look lively. I can’t stop myself from staring, can’t stop the burning desire to prick my fingers against the thorns. To think, they might hurt less than my heart parading about my chest, or my feet blistering from the journey.    
  “To think, they might even outlive you.”  
  15 years. 35 years. 50 years. Doesn’t it bother you, to buy roses for your love just to see them die in three days? He’s right, I thought. These wild roses probably will outlive me, and him, and the rest of the world. Maybe that’s for the better, for them to burst with life and threaten all opposition. So, why did the first romantic pluck a rose for his girlfriend, knowing the result would always bleed?  
  I slammed my fist against the wall, bundling my fingers around one of perhaps hundreds of roses, and ripped it from its core. The petals drifted slowly into the wind from my grasp, but my hand wouldn’t let go of the remains. I held onto the intensity of a stare, but I couldn’t find any words at all. Just the sounds of the wind tearing apart my ears, and the shaking of my fist growing weary from the stress.  
  Red, I think, is the most common color we suffer through seeing. My hands are burning red, now from the bruise of the wall than the cold. My face, from birth to this very day, is flushed red in some disturbed combination of anger and bliss. His lips, my lips. His gums, my gums. His eyes, my eyes. Everyone a varying shade of red, and upon busting our feature open, they all pour out the same appalling liquid.  
  I fear my body’s been entirely drained, now. Are you still seeing me, or the emptied out ghost of a silhouette? With my brain now far off in the clouds, useless to me, I rest the rose filled palm onto your seeing eye. There’s nothing left to see, but somehow the simple gesture of a touch serves me well.  
  We could sink, together, here, and that’d be alright. Don’t you agree?  
  “Slaine,” he says. Empty, empty words. It’s funny, how much a name can mean, but I can’t assign anything to mine. Nothing at all.  
  
  I don’t remember why we started our ambitious expedition, nor why we are still walking. I can’t even remember starting up again at all. My feet are numb to it all, I’ve turned to a slightly uncanny yet devoid smile plastered onto my face.  
  The days pass by in pairs when you travel in twos. It feels like we’ve been walking for years without stop, I’ve even already forgotten our last pit stop. Actually, according to the notoriously ostentatious Inaho, it’s only been three months, or quite specifically 91 days, 3 hours, five minutes and fifty-two seconds last I asked. How many more seconds do we keep treading over? Time feels so short an yet so long when you think only in seconds. I feel like I’ve lost so much, in only 60 seconds, but gained so little, in 60 days.  
  Perhaps, 91 days 3 hours five minutes and fifty-two seconds ago, I would have wanted nothing more than to leave the dreadful prison I trapped myself in. But if I had hesitated, for even just one little second, I wonder how I’d feel 91 days 3 hours five minutes and fifty-one seconds later. I think every night, now, be it alone or with you, how different my life could have been if every second I played my cards differently.  
  In one abrupt motion, I stop dead in my tracks, pulling you back a little. There’s something stupid on my mind I can’t stop wondering, something you probably won’t have a satisfying answer for, but I need to blurt out before I burst.  
  “Where are we supposed to go, when we’ve traveled every inch of the earth?”  
  You turn to face me, a little slow, and point up the the sky. The pitch black vacuum of the sky, somehow so lovely at a distance... Without your oddly pleasant smile, the thought might have put me down.  
  “Home, I guess.”  
  
  Home is a strange human concept. What is ‘home’? I’ve been mulling it over in my restless state of tossing and turning, and I can’t really pick a definitive answer.  
  Home is where one belongs. A warm place, a comforting place. Home is where one is loved, where one gives and receives love. Home is where scribbles are hung up on the fridge, where cinnamon smells from the oven. Home is the doorstep of your first kiss, and the marketplace of every kiss after.  
  “What does home mean to you?”  
  I think you might be asleep, but your face is scrunched in a subtle way that tells me your thinking about an answer, yourself. And what initially I thought was just ‘giving you time’ turned to hours and, soon enough, to just in time for the sun to rise. And you couldn’t see it, with your back turned and eye still shut tight, but it was a beautiful sunrise. Your hair is just the right shade of brown to glow transparent at the suns blinding light, and the clouds welcomed in the new day with auspicious oranges and pinks. It’s a moment I won’t forget, a moment that makes me never regret the second I said yes to your unbelievable stupid idea.  
  “Home is where the most important people are.”  
  “Your sister isn’t in space.”  
  “ _People_.”  
  “Ah, Asseylum too, then?”  
  You bare that awkward, bored glare in response to my ignorance. To which, I would say, isn’t ignorance at all, but my own inhibition. But, as with anything I could say, it wouldn’t be enough. Nothing is ever enough, for Kaizuka Inaho.  
  “Do you think it’s odd to love the same person as the one you love?”  
  I dodge bullets with an infinite amount of questions I never had a chance to ask when I was a curious little child. They’re the kind of questions a mother brushes off sincerely, in that sweet endearing voice you hate hearing, but can’t get enough of. And after outstaying your welcome, the dreadful sigh of the tired mother, who no longer wants anything to do with you, who might even forget you exist as soon as the car stops.  
  Sometimes, I forget Inaho has any capacity for emotion at all, but there’s little things you notice about someone after exerting your body for so long. Your body does a lot of funny little things when it’s at wits’ end.  
  Even now, your smiling in ways I’ve never seen you smile. Laughing in ways I’ve never heard someone laugh before. Singing in tunes I’ve never even considered.  
  “I guess so,” there’s a little pause built for your gracelessly dry laugh, “When both ends are idiots.”  
  The stars are mostly gone, now. Somewhere, I can still see a small trace of the moon fading from this side of the worlds memory, and I can imagine which constellations were within reach only moments ago. I wonder how they look for the girls I’ve left behind, for every man and women I’ve killed, whether inadvertently or entirely intentionally. God, what do stars look like from down below, at the core of the Earth? My stomach crunches painfully within, I can’t stand to think about the sky any longer.  
  Turning over to the dirt, I try to think of how glad I am things turned out as they did. Regardless of the blood dripping from our hands, maybe still in this case from grasping at roses dangling on fishhooks, there must be something were both striving for, right?  
  Maybe it’s for a definitive place to call home.  
  
  I used to think I had the concept of slow mastered. Slow is explaining in detail the bits and pieces of Earth I, myself, never got to see. Slow is getting beat with a stick but never answering like a dog. Slow is elongated kissing, taking in life at the same rate it drains. Slow is the feeling of rain splattering to smaller drops on my face, hearing you state boldly I’ll sooner “catch a cold.”  
  For a while, I thought I was pretty good at planning every move two steps ahead. I couldn’t imagine for so long I’ve been more than three steps behind. I’ve been running the race at a snails pace, but is that really so bad?  
  I can’t take time to stop and smell the roses, anymore. I think, somehow, I can’t afford to stand still, that the longer I’m given the chance to consider my life the less it ends up being worth.  
  I won’t stop walking, even as the rain threatens to pierce away every last bit of me. I want to remember the sensation of a slow kiss with a girl I really, truly love. One so mind numbingly slow it starts to hurt but can’t end. But all I have now is you, now several miles between us, and an empty head stuffed with what feels like should be profound ideas but really amounts to nothing more than sickness. When there’s nowhere left to explore, nothing left to be said, where will I end up?  
  When the world sucks me dry, will it really matter where I’m hung up?  
  
  I’m sneezing.  
  I’m sneezing, and can’t stop sneezing. But I swear I’m not sick. I’ve said that about a thousand times since reuniting with my guardian, to the point he might think I’ve dropped all intelligence somewhere along the way. I feel a little more human, like this. Actually, in that case, I almost wish you tagged along.  
  “Would you... Like... Do you want some medicine?” You try to fit words between my sneezing fits. I’ve gotten to a point I can’t even respond without my body denying me the luxury.  
  “ _I’m not––_ ”  
  “At least sleep.” You push my face down, and I’ve lost room for discussion entirely. As soon as my body hit the floor, I knew I wouldn’t be getting up for the rest of the day. The rain is still pouring, the world is still dark –– I can’t even decipher the time. For some reason lost on me, my first thought as my body collided with the ground was how the ground must be eroding away as we speak. When I wake up, the Earth will be so much different than I left it, and neither of us will notice.  
  “Don’t forget, for me.”  
  “Forget what?”  
  “What this place looks like. I’m going to forget, I’m already forgetting things. I don’t want to forget this.”  
  Replaying my words in my mind, I’m finally ready to admit I might be a little sick. Just a little.  
  He places a cold hand against my forehead. I thought you hated the cold?  
  “Sure.”  
  I feel like a child, but it’s not a bad feeling. It’s a very new concept to me, and maybe it’s odd to think of myself as your son rather than responsibility, but I appreciate that closeness either way. The rain’s quieted down a lot, and this moments overstayed its welcome, but I keep breathing. Slowly, in and out, like it’s the only thing I have left in this world.  
  If this is what it means, to love someone, than what is this moment if not home?  
  
  I didn’t really mean to sleep, and it frustrates me to say I feel better for it. Your body has warmed up a lot, against mine. Those once frigid hands are on fire draped lazily by my cheeks. I can think of a thousand times I’ve held Inaho’s hand tightly, never letting go. But this is the first, or perhaps in a way second, time I’ve seen Inaho grip my hand so intensely.  
  Maybe there’s something worth living for, after all.  
  I lifted his hand up, kissing the back of it. Muffling my words behind its wall, I say all I’ve needed to, and maybe all I’ve needed to hear.  
  “Let’s go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Leave a comment! Tell me about memorable walks you've taken.


End file.
